This is what it all leads up to. All that hard work of creating the structure around your mailing list has finally come down to what it is you’re actually mailing. There’s no need for me to explain what a newsletter is, but I will give you some advice on how to make it more effective.

I want to start by explaining why it is important to even have one of these in the first place.

Purpose of a newsletter

Think of it this way. You have a website and on it you sell a product. If someone finds your product through a search engine or an ad you placed somewhere out in the world, they can go to your site and buy it. That’s great, but what happens when they leave? Do you sell more products? And if so, will your customers come back to buy them too?

These are all valid questions that most businesses often ask and one major solution to getting your customers to come back (besides offering quality products and service) is to tell them why they should come back. Newsletters are great promotional tools. Here are some things you can include in a newsletter to increase its effectiveness:

• Provide information about special offers for products on your website.
• Attach coupons for more money-saving opportunities.
• Send free stuff like ebooks, offers to other websites and helpful downloads.
• Offer helpful information that a customer can use to get more out of the products they bought from you.
• Include direct links to specific areas of your website to help people find things easier.

Use to bring in more income

Newsletters can used in conjunction with your mailing list to send out mass offers for your website that can bring in extra income at just about any time you wish. As an example, if you have a list of 10,000 people and only 3% actually respond to a $20 offer you sent, you can potentially make $6000 in one email blast! Now that’s power.

Building your mailing list is a vital tool for promotion of your website, your products and services and a way to get related offers, discounts and important information into the inboxes of your trusted visitors.

Internet marketing is competitive and you need to be on the cutting edge of the competition if you want to stay afloat. A squeeze page is just one more way to extract (or squeeze) business out of your website. Think of it like squeezing the last drops of juice out of a lemon. Since every visitor on your site counts, it’s important to find ways to get them on your mailing list without running them off.

What is a squeeze page?

You may find various definitions about what a squeeze page actually is and some might even consider a squeeze page the same as a landing page and they are right for the most part–they are very similar.

I make the distinction between the two by reserving landing pages specifically for the advertising of a certain product and a squeeze page for simply the advertising of your site and mailing list as a whole. The main difference would be that one page is very targeted and one is not.

How do I make them effective?

Testing, testing and more testing. That’s the short answer! Nobody can answer this question for you because every website is different than the next. Your visitors might have very different needs than those that come to my site and only you would know what it is they need. The good news is that I have some general tips on how to make a squeeze page! Take these tips and mix them with your own style of branding and you’ll have the advantage.

• Optin form – This is the most important part! If your users don’t have anywhere to signup, it’s pointless to have. Make this form easily found and clearly marked. Don’t hide or dress it up too much otherwise, you’ll lose potential signups.
• Benefits – This is where you tell your visitors what they get out of the deal. Remember, the whole point is to get subscribers to your site so offer them something they will be interested in based off the content that your site is about.
• Header graphics – Ensure that you have an attractive header graphic. Consider the squeeze page somewhat of an advertisement, so this graphic should draw people in. Keep it simple, but effective.
• Headline text – Provide captivating headline text to help with the graphical “sales pitch” of your newsletter. Once again, the idea is to draw interest to your ad, but most of all, maintain that interest long enough to produce a sign up.
• Sample product – If you can, provide a sample of the product such as a lengthly product description or a video of your product in action.

More info

As I stated in the beginning, the success of your squeeze page will depend heavily on your audience and you need to know who you’re promoting to in order to increase signup frequency. As an example, if you run a blog about gardening, it’s probable that your users aren’t going to like (or care for) large, colorful, in-your-face graphics and crazy sounds or music, so tone it down.

Beyond that, I hope you got the basics down! Have fun with it!

Setting up a ‘reviews’ page is a great idea to help promote the products and services you have listed on your landing pages. It might not come as a surprise, but today, more and more people are trusting what the Internet has to say about the quality and effectiveness of new products. This is causing less effectiveness over traditional advertising.

What is a review page?

Just as it sounds, it’s a place where people can discuss your products and website. If you’re running a blog, you might already have somewhat of a review system in place and that’s your comment space. Each post you make has the capability of receiving comments from everyone that reads it. By the way, make sure you read my tips about comments while you’re here.

Giving your users access to such content is very important to help sell your stuff. Of course, when you make your own website, you’re going to biased about your products and people can see right through that. It’s not to say that you’re lying, but people want to really know what the facts are.

How important are reviews and testimonials?

Ask yourself these questions: when you made your last purchase, how much research did you do on the product? If you did any, how much weight did a user’s personal review of the product hold up against the manufacturer’s description of the product?

Look at it this way, if your product starts making it around the Internet, people will review it anyway, so you might as well put some of these comments on your own site to help people along. Using review pages in conjunction with your landing pages will create a successful marketing plan.

What not to do

• DON’T lie – Making up fake reviews and testimonials will only take you so far. Eventually someone will buy your product and if it’s not like your fake reviews said, they will blast out the truth. In time, your site will be the only one offering positive reviews on your product. And how bad will that look?!
• DON’T disparage – Never disparage a competitor’s product that’s similar to yours. Even if yours is truly better, putting down another business will only harm your reputation and image.
• DON’T ignore comments – If you ignore negative comments, you won’t have the chance to improve what’s wrong. Also, flooding a space with only positive remarks can have the same effect as making up reviews. Somewhere else, the truth will come out.

Go look for reviews

It’s true that not everybody will care to write positive comments for you. If you are selling products, you should go out and ask your clients to say a few things about their experience. Offer them a free link on your website or something.

If you notice your business is getting listed on sites like Yelp.com, start linking to them to show your customers you’re not afraid of presenting 3rd party information whether it’s negative or not.

I’m sure that you have seen quite a few landing pages throughout your Internet travels, but maybe didn’t know what they were called. Or maybe you did, but didn’t understand the importance of these pages.

What is a landing page?

Simply put, it’s a page you land on after clicking a link. This sounds easy enough, but deep down, every little detail you incorporate (or don’t) will affect the quality and performance of this page. So what are they for? When an advertiser is promoting a product or service, they will create a static page on the Internet somewhere that showcases this product or service and is essentially the make or break presentation.

They are commonly used by affiliate marketers as a means to send their visitors to the advertiser’s website to gain a referral bonus. Here’s an example of a successful landing page.

Why is a landing page important?

From an advertiser’s point of view, your landing page should be designed to sell. Unlike a face-to-face sales pitch where you can gauge things like emotion, customer response and even overcome objections, a webpage is a one-shot deal. If you customer lands here and loses interest, they leave the page and your sale is gone forever!

Just like creating effective advertisements like Google ads, banners, etc. you want to keep people interested and above all, you want to make them want your product when they’re done reading the page.

From a visitor’s point of view, your landing page should be straight forward. It should sell the product well and sell it fast. Pre-answer everyone’s questions up front and add just enough visuals to keep people interested.

How should I design this page?

The design should be non-intrusive, but visual enough to maintain interest. For content, some people will tell you that you shouldn’t use a targeted landing page (see below) to promote or discuss anything other than what product your selling. Others might tell you to use landing pages as opportunities to upsell other things you might be offering.

Types of landing pages:

• Targeted – These pages may be part of your website, but they look nothing like your site because they are only there to promote one item. The entire page is written only for this item and does not contain any other links, pictures or “plugs”.
• Dynamic – This type of page can be mixed with other types. Essentially a dynamic page, much like any dynamic webpage, will allow you to create custom content based on a referring site or affiliate link. An example would be in the landing page made references to the site you came from, so it appears as though that site heavily endorses this product.
• Static – This is your average landing page and it can be a page build specifically for a product, or it can simply be a static page located within your site that helps promote the product. Using this type of page may detract a little form your intending purpose, but it could open doors for promotion of the rest of your business.

My suggestion is to go with a page that only focuses on one thing. The reason for this is that you’ll be advertising this page through a PPC network and the traffic generated from these networks is very targeted toward a particular niche. So if you landing page was selling auto-blogging software, you would only be targeting web traffic that was looking for auto-blogging software and therefore you would not want to fill this page with information on other software you’re selling.

Getting started

The first thing you want to do is gather your ideas. Think about what you want to accomplish with your page, who you’re advertising to, how they are able to buy your product and what would make them interested. Once you have these basics down, you should have a clear understanding of how to setup your page.

Just keep in mind that the goal of landing pages is to convert sales quickly. The people that will be clicking through are not there to see your site. They were advised by someone else to click on that link and you need to be there to present them with a valid reason for staying.

Increase effectiveness

Here are some tips on how to increase the overall effectiveness of your landing pages:

1. Create concise text without being too short. Find that perfect balance so you’re not overdoing or underdoing it.
2. Add a FAQ to try and answer questions you might already know will probably be asked by your visitors. This way, they don’t need to take time to find out how to contact you.
3. Keep the content search engine friendly and make sure you’re not using duplicate content on multiple landing pages.
4. Make sure the page loads fast. Nobody is going to wait for your page to load if it takes longer than 5 seconds.
5. Consider adding a video clip of the product in use or you explaining your service. Even a video of you reading the same content that’s already on the page will be highly effective.
6. Add some social media links to increase your exposure. Use sites like Twitter and Facebook so people can readily find you if they’re really interested in what you offer.
7. If you have a few customer praises about your products, put them on there to let people know what others think of you.

Testing your landing pages

In researching this topic, I found a great site that talked about testing landing pages. Originally I wasn’t even going to mention it because it’s one of those things that webmasters usually do naturally by reviewing page stats and click-through ratios, but this site brought up a really good point.

Michael Bloch from TamingTheBeast.net mentioned that to test a landing page, you should send 5 of your friends to the page without telling them what the page is about and have them look it over for about 5 seconds. When they’re done, instead of asking them “Does it look good?”, ask them what they remembered about the page. Don’t get too specific with the question. Just have them spit out key things that they remembered.

If they can’t even tell you what you were selling or what the page was about, then something is very wrong! Their input might be able to help you pinpoint areas of the page that need improvement.

Further testing is easily done with the web statistics I mentioned, but don’t just look at counters. Look at how long your visitors are staying on the page. If you read your own page from top to bottom, how long did it take you? Are your visitors staying for at least that long?

Further reading

This post was just to touch some key points on landing pages and is in no way intended to be 100% thorough! There are countless possibilities to creating, promoting and using landing pages and your results will vary greatly based on your industry and web skills.